[adventured]

> but a lot of americans think the saudis are some kind of beacon in the middle east.

A lot of Americans so on and so forth, supposedly.

For example, one could say a lot of Americans think Iran is better and are fascinated with it (I see that premise on a frequent basis on HN and Reddit). Why are some large groups of people in the US fascinated by Iran? Such statements are, at best, opinions. I'd say that Iran is not better, they're both similarly terrible on human rights, they're both extraordinarily violent theocracies (Iran murdered thousands of protestors last year, while the US media went out of their way to ignore it; contrast that with the Khashoggi coverage - which tells you everything you need to know about who is fascinated with Iran). In the US, the left is very sympathetic with Iran and they more strongly dislike Saudi Arabia; and that's reversed for the right. Such theocracies have dominated the Middle East since the end of the Islamic golden age, over seven centuries ago. In Iran they murder gay people and deprive their women of basic human rights as a matter of cultural routine, as in Saudi Arabia. Both aggressively sponsor terrorism and proxy wars all over the Middle East, fighting for influence and position. Some just pretend there is a difference between the two.

[phobosanomaly]

Ok, I'm going to throw out an oversimplification here, but I think it's representative of a common college-educated American's image of Iran vs. KSA.

Iran is a large, middle-income country full of lots of regular folks who wrestle with weird internal politics much like we do. Sure, they're a theocracy, but we also overthrew the only democratically elected leader they've ever had. I think Iranians are pretty easy to relate to. The US is full of Irainians who moved here because they weren't willing to buy into the theocracy.

KSA is a tiny, yet massively wealthy country full of spoiled princes drag-racing Ferraris and employing de-facto slaves who is currently committing war crimes in Yemen with weapons we sold them. A lot less sympathetic, and I'm not familiar with a large Saudi expat population that fled because of disagreement with the politics of the ruling monarchs.

[adventured]

Saudi Arabia isn't so tiny these days. They're #41 in population and climbing rapidly. Their population is larger than Australia and will soon eclipse Canada and Poland. In ~10-12 years they'll catch Spain and Ukraine in population.

Iran - as with Iraq and others in the region - is of course seeing a similarly rapid population expansion.

> middle-income country

Iran isn't a middle income country. Their GDP per capita places them at #95 (below Iraq) - around $5,500 - they're a very impoverished low-income nation. That's comparable to Jamaica, South Africa and Guyana, far away from middle income. To break into the middle income group you plainly have to approach the global average on GDP per capita (or higher), around $11,000 and above will get you into that discussion. Poland and Chile are middle income nations, with roughly $15k in GDP per capita.

> Sure, they're a theocracy, but we also overthrew the only democratically elected leader they've ever had

Mohammad Mosaddegh was not democratically elected at all. He was specifically appointed by a king (the Shah of Iran) and feudal lords that ruled the Majlis. It's one of the great propaganda myths of modern times that Mosaddegh was somehow democratically elected, while it's a total fraud of a premise. Iran has never been democratic, not even remotely close, not at any point in their entire history.

Even Wikipedia openly supports the fact that Mosaddegh wasn't democratically elected, and instead he was appointed:

"On 28 April 1951, the Shah appointed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister after the Majlis (Parliament of Iran) nominated Mosaddegh by a vote of 79–12."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh#Appointment...

The Majlis itself was not democratically elected. It almost exclusively consisted of large land owners that were de facto feudal lords.

This would be like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump or Barack Obama (a former President or similar) appointing the new President after the US Senate voted on who to nominate. Absolutely nobody would think that was a democratic process. And it wasn't a democratic process when Iran did it.

Today, the same people that claim Iran was a democracy in 1951, simultaneously claim the US is not a democracy. It's a rather hilarious spin if one is capable of being objective about the propaganda behind that myth-building push.

[sweeneyrod]

> Their GDP per capita places them at #95 (below Iraq) - around $5,500 - they're a very impoverished low-income nation.

That's nominal not adjusted for cost of living. For the latter they're close to the world average, above Brazil and not far below Argentina. Possibly more relevantly, "middle-income" is defined by the World Bank (https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/90...), which in fact categorises Iran as "upper-middle-income".

Iraq isn't actually that poor, it's just terrible for mysterious other reasons.